Nordic Countries 14th Architecture Biennale

Forms of freedom-African Independence and Nordic Models
Exhibition of the Nordic Countries

The Nordic Countries pavilion at the 2014 Architecture Biennale comprehensively illustrates for the first time the long collaboration that the Scandinavian nations established with three African countries: Tanzania, Kenia, and Zambia, after the independence they obtained during the 1960s. Since then and until the 1980s, Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish architects contributed with their designs to export the Nordic social democracy model in that part of Africa.

The Nordic Countries (Finland, Norway, and Sweden) pavilion was completed in 1962 on a design by the 1997 Pritzker price-winner architect Sverre Fehn from Norway. The 2014 exhibition was designed by the Oslo-based practice Space Group.

Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014
Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014 is an invitation to the national pavilions to show, each in their own way, the process of the erasure of national characteristics in architecture in favor of the almost universal adoption of a single modern language and a single repertoire of typologies – a more complex process than we typically recognize, involving significant encounters between cultures, technical inventions, and hidden ways of remaining “national”.